Author Meets Critics: Recent Anthropological Works on Secularization, Modernity, and Religious Life Outside Western Contexts

This roundtable brings together anthropologists with diverse methodological, theoretical, and topical backgrounds whose recent publications have each nonetheless centered questions surrounding the accommodations and counter-movements that have emerged within various non-Western religious communities in response to processes of modernity and secularization. Panelists will include: (1) Mayfair Yang, whose work, Re-enchanting Modernity: Ritual Economy and Society in Wenzhou, China (2020), scrutinizes how investments in temple-building, rituals, and festivals operate to subvert state secularization in China; (2) Hannah Gould, author of When Death Falls Apart: Making and Unmaking the Necromaterial Traditions of Contemporary Japan (2023), which surveys how changing Buddhist death rituals and funerary equipment in contemporary Japan reflect adaptations and reactions to demographic decline; and (3) Eric Hoenes del Pinal, who examines the role of language and discourse in shaping and contesting Catholic identities among an indigenous Q’eqchi’ Maya community in contemporary Guatemala in “Guarded by Two Jaguars: A Catholic Parish Divided by Language and Faith” (2022).